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Queer Desires and Satirised Empires: Notes on Aubrey Menen's A This is the preprint version of the chapter published in Luther, J. Daniel and Ung Loh, Jennifer, (eds.), Queer Asia: Decolonising and Reimagining Sexuality and Gender. London: Zed Books, pp. 125-145. Preprint version downloaded from SOAS Research Online: http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/29921 Queer Desires and Satirised Empires: Notes on Aubrey Menen’s A Conspiracy of Women (1965) David Lunn SOAS University of London Aubrey Menen seems, from the state of the rather scant scholarly literature devoted to him, to be a writer in constant need of “revisiting” or “reintroducing”.1 His obscurity and erasure is well demonstrated by the title of Mary Jane Hurst’s 1994 article, ‘Reintroducing Aubrey Menen’, wherein she attempted to “reclaim his relevance for literary and cultural studies” (p. 129). This is an unfortunate requirement, for Menen occupies a unique place in the history of what is understood as queer literature, as well as post-colonial, satirical, and indeed English-language literature altogether.2 In attempting to account for the ways in which writers such as Menen have been largely elided from postcolonial studies and English literary history, Susheila Nasta points to the operations of literary history writing and canon formation that have “done much to exclude such voices, placing them in categories for convenience which do more to distort than clarify” (2002, p. 22). Thus a separation is effected between “Indo-Anglian” or early “nationalist” writings, such as that of Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao, and a “later post-war Asian group of so- called ‘immigrant’, ‘expatriate’, or ‘diasporic’ writers” (ibid.). Her explanation is convincing: the complexities of Menen and other writers, whose biographies and writings do not slot neatly into such categories, are unable to be understood from within the narrow confines of these “academic orthodoxies”, and an unfortunate “repetitive myopia in reading practices” (ibid.) has led to the neglect of these important precursors to the broadly accepted canon of postcolonial writing in English.3 This is of particular importance given the queer positionality that Menen’s work articulates. The call to consider such works is therefore not an assimilationist one, but rather is intended to disturb and demonstrate the limits of all canon formations, even one as supposedly emancipatory and liberating as that of postcolonial literature. Another issue of canonicity is raised by the enduring inscrutability of satire, the mode in which Menen’s novels revel, which lends to the texts a superficial transience—a sense that they are “of their time”—and to the critic and scholar an easy way out of treating such supposedly flippant or “light” texts with the seriousness that they perhaps deserve, but that anyway feels almost incompatible with their style. Ruvani Ranasinha draws our attention, perhaps satirically, to the difficulties of reading Menen’s satires, then as now: Significantly, the first reviews of The Prevalence of Witches . paid little attention to Menen’s satire of imperialism and of the British residents, interpreting his portrayal of the European colony as “a queer but agreeable lot [who] sit talking, talking and talking.” The object of satire 1 Compare one of the reviews of a 2010 “complete and unabridged” re-publication of four of his novels (Cheerath, 2011, pp. 240–43) and one of the very few academic articles on his life and works (Hurst, 1994, pp. 129–94). 2 Other short but useful studies of Menen do exist: see, inter alia, Mohammed Elias (1985), and a four- page section from Leela Gandhi (2008). More recently, Rajorshi Das has examined aspects of sexuality in Menen’s autobiographical writings (2017) and returned to Menen’s infamously banned retelling of the Ramayana (2018). 3 Gandhi makes a similar point: “Menen deserves a more respected place in the annals of the Indian English novel—as do his contemporaries. Although tentative and often awkward, the novels of the 1930s and 1940s chronicle and respond to a remarkable era in world history. And, contrary to harsh judgement, they are the legitimate forerunners of the new postcolonial or diasporic novels produced by the new generation of postnational cosmopolitans.” (Gandhi, p. 218). Her formulation remains problematic: to my mind, Menen’s works resist simple categorisation under the “Indian English novel”. Cf. his own attitude to being described as Indian: “On the whole, I prefer not to be called ‘Indian’. I am not Indian; I don’t speak a word of any Indian language (except achcha). I am not Hindu or Muslim and I don’t kill people who are. I am by birth, language and inclinations English, in fact so English that I do not like embarrassing other Englishmen by saying so.” (Menen, 1947–48). constantly shifts in the text leading the same reviewer to observe: “The Prevalence of Witches is a diverting squib. I must confess I was not always quite sure whom or what it is aimed at; but the general effect was to leave me vaguely stimulated.”4 What is required is a wholesale reappraisal of Menen’s many significant writings. His status as a popular and prolific satirist—of empire, race, social and sexual mores, and more besides— active particularly in the period of Britain’s colonial withdrawal, invites us to reconsider the processes of formation of postcolonial writing in the metropole, while his sexuality and mixed- race identity, foregrounded in his autobiographical writings and a crucial backdrop to his fictional creations, complicates any attempt to categorise him or his writing. The occasion of the “Queer” Asia conference on “desire, decriminalisation, and decolonisation”—and this resulting volume—thus presented the perfect opportunity for a foray into Menen’s writings, given his treatment of queer desires, his satirising of empire, colonialism, and what we might term uneven cultural encounters, and the fact that most of his writings appeared either side of the 1967 decriminalisation of homosexual acts in the United Kingdom. Menen’s Conspiracy, as much of his other work, embodies and enacts a queer positionality—that is (following de Lauretis (1991), Halperin (1995), and Dowson (2000) among others), a perspective that is uniquely and powerfully placed for “interrogations of all normative and non- normative acts, desires, perceptions, and possibilities” (Giffney, 2004, p. 74), including here gender roles and relations, empire and colonialism, religious sentiments and practices, and yes, sexualities in their many forms. Menen was born in London in 1912, to an Irish mother and Indian father. In his collection of autobiographical essays, Aubrey Menen wrote with biting irony on the apparently “whimsical” idea of his parents’ “bringing up an Indo-Irishman as a Briton” (1954, p. 8). But, as that text and others show, his was a clear-eyed critique of British or English society, alongside empire and colonialism, patriotism, and nationalism in all its forms—British, certainly, but Indian too—that drew on his mixed-race ancestry as a comic resource. As he quipped at the opening of his 1954 “autobiographical essay on national pride”: My ancestors on my mother’s side were brigands who infested a range of hills overlooking the Lake of Killarney, called Macgillicuddy’s Reeks. Two things are known to have run in their blood—a tendency to end up on the gallows and an itch to harry the English. I have managed to eradicate the first (1954, p. 7). In what follows, I offer some notes on another of his anti-colonial or anti-imperial satires, A Conspiracy of Women, which, as the title might suggest, combines critique of some of his favourite recurrent themes with ironic and queering perspectives on gender roles and sexuality. I do so in the hope of bringing to renewed attention Menen’s careful, bitingly funny, and at times quite profound satirical retelling of Alexander the Great’s encounter with Persia and India, in which he sends up imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, gender norms, and heteronormativity more broadly, with dry wit and in eminently readable prose. His inherited and uneradicated “itch to harry the English” is on full display (at least if one is content to elide British imperialism with the English alone), and the novel marks, along with the rest of his oeuvre, a satirical landmark in anti-imperial and postcolonial writing in English. Queer lines on Alexander the Great One day when Alexander the Great was sitting in his tent he said to his friend Hephaestion, “Hephaestion, have you ever thought about the fact that women make up half the human race?” “Once,” said Hephaestion. “And what did you think about it?” said Alexander. 4 Ranasinha (pp. 28–9) here quotes Peter Quennell’s ‘Review of The Prevalence of Witches’, Daily Mail (London), 22 November 1947. Prevalence, Menen’s first novel, is perhaps the most widely discussed in the academic literature: see Hurst (1994); Nasta (2002, pp. 48–50); Ranasinha (2007). “I thought it was a pity,” said Hephaestion. (Menen, 1965, p. 3) Menen is hardly the first to make a homoerotic subject of Alexander the Great, and the suggestion that Alexander shared more than friendship with his general Hephaestion has been an enduring and contested one.5 However, the factuality or otherwise of this homosexual relationship is, here at least, beside the point. Menen’s satirical innovation is to posit this as a scandalous open secret6 amongst the men and women of Alexander’s army and community, and to interpolate it into what is otherwise a gendered comedy of manners between men and women. The opening lines of the novel quoted above, in which Hephaestion casually suggests that it is a pity that half the world’s population are women, are framed by two distinct prefaces. The second, addressed to women, reads in part: When you have finished this book you will observe that all I have done is remove the Serpent from the Garden of Eden.
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